The contrast of town and village life in laurence stern’s novels content: Introduction chapter I. The British novelist Laurence Sterne

2.2. Background of the novel
Predictably, since the 1980s, literary critics have responded in diverse ways to these complex and densely interconnected topics. The new perspectives offered by postmodernist philosophy in the 1960s, inspired some to explore how time-related phenomena could reveal conceptual instabilities in the literature of the long eighteenth century. Paul de Man’s 1969 examination of the relationships that exist between allegorical signs powerfully revealed the discovery by the romantics of “a truly temporal predicament,” while Paul Ricoeur’s three-volume Temps et Récit (Time and Narrative; 1983, 1984, 1985) remains a prominent landmark in relation to which all critics interested in such topics are obliged to orientate themselves.²⁸ Ricoeur eschews sharp distinctions between literary criticism and philosophy, and his attempts to demonstrate that cosmological and phenomenological time are profoundly integrated have inescapable consequences for the analysis of narrative structure.²⁹ By contrast, other critics have favored more stolidly historical (if not militantly [New] Historicist) explorations. Most influentially, in his monograph Telling Time (1996), Stuart Sherman showed how “the new chronometry” of the horological revolution was absorbed into “narrative form” during the period 1660 to 1785, charting this development from private diaries to periodical essays to travel writing.³⁰ A similar attentiveness to historical progression has encouraged some to divide the long eighteenth century into distinct subperiods defined by discernible shifts in temporal perspectives and practices. In The Mirror and the Lamp (1953), M. H. Abrams contrasted the philosophies of mechanism and organicism, observing that, since each seeks to offer a complete worldview, “neither can stop until it has swallowed up the archetype of the other”—and numerous critics have subsequently probed these (and related) ideas in relation to chronology and horology.³¹ In 1970 Ian Donaldson argued that the romantic preference for images drawn “direct from nature” (e.g., “nightingales, sensitive plants, erupting volcanoes”) succeeded the eighteenth-century penchant for products of “human craftsmanship” (e.g., “clocks, machines, garden mazes, theatres”), and he discussed three ways in which Henry Fielding and Laurence Sterne purposefully used and abused clock-based temporalities in their novels. In the 1980s Samuel L. Macey surveyed at length how different writers responded to clock-based time-telling, contending that authors such as Percy Shelley and Edgar Allan Poe espoused “clockwork diabolism”—that is, the belief that man-made mechanical devices are inherently infernal.³² This stance differs markedly from the wry skepticism that Pope had expressed a hundred years earlier in his celebrated couplet “’Tis with our Judgments as our Watches, none / Go just alike, yet each believes his own.”³³ Pope’s apposite comparison was probably derived from lines that appear in the epilogue to John Suckling’s Algaura (1638):

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  But as when an authentic watch is shown
  
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  Each man winds up, and rectifies his own,
  
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  So in our very judgements [ … ]³⁴
  

The respective disenchantments that Macey associates with the Augustans and the romantics differ significantly: a satirical awareness of arbitrary inaccuracy does not necessarily entail an overt presupposition of devilment, and part of the difficulty of delineating the relationship between time and literature throughout the long eighteenth century arises directly from these shifts and fluctuations.
However, some caution is required here. Macey’s work has certainly helped to bolster the widespread conviction that the romantics knowingly spurned mechanical timepieces, favoring horological archaism over precise temporal quantification. In particular, he has stated that William Hazlitt, William Blake, and Charles Lamb “reacted so strongly against clocks that they even looked back with nostalgia to the sandglass or sundial.”³⁵ It is too simplistic, though, to allege that the latter invariably denoted a wistful longing for a preindustrial age. Sandglasses possessed distinctive characteristic properties—the need for iterative turning, granular flow—and, by the start of the eighteenth century, they had accrued a complex cluster of symbolical associations ranging from religious denominations to freemasonry to piracy.³⁶ Crucially, as time-keepers, they were still used for certain practical tasks well into the nineteenth century, most notably when, in conjunction with the chip log, they enabled the speed of a ship to be estimated in knots.³⁷ Consequently, literary references to sandglasses during this period often focus on pragmatic practicalities rather than antiquated undertones, though these things could (and often did) intermingle. In John Keats’s Fall of Hyperion (1819), the narrator almost dies while ascending some marble stairs, and a voice speaks to him from out of a cloud of incense:

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  The sands of thy short life are spent this hour,
  
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  And no hand in the universe can turn
  
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  Thy hourglass, if these gummed leaves be burnt
  
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  Ere thou canst mount up these immortal steps.³⁸
  

The analogy here focuses on functionality rather than reminiscence: unlike mechanical clocks and watches, hourglasses cease to function after only a relatively short period of time (e.g., 15 minutes, 30 minutes, an hour), assuming there is no external source of intervention—and sundials were similarly associated with pragmatic agency rather than wistful longing for the past. Once again, the historical record indicates unambiguously (if counterintuitively) that sales of these devices increased throughout the long eighteenth century. This occurred because even the most expensive mechanical timepieces required regular resetting and readjusting.³⁹ Although church bells could be used as a convenient temporal anchor for this task, it was widely acknowledged that “the greater number of these Clocks must be wrong.”⁴⁰ Consequently, scientific instrument-makers continued to manufacture countless portable universal equatorial rings and tablet sundials well into the nineteenth century. Also, like sandglasses, sundials had accumulated a powerful symbolical resonance over the centuries, and they were particularly associated with constancy and fidelity:

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  For loyalty is still the same,
  
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  Whether it win or lose the game;
  
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  True as the dial to the sun,
  
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  Altho’ it be not shin’d upon.⁴¹
  

In these lines from Samuel Butler’s Hudibras (1663–78), honest allegiance never succumbs to the vacillations of chance and fortune—a pertinent message for a nation refashioning itself after the Civil War and the Restoration. Unlike clocks and watches, therefore, sundials neither coerce nor supersede nature. As Paul Glennie and Nigel Thrift have emphasized, during the early modern period “[c]locks shifted from being purely proxies or intermediaries for what a sundial would show, were it not cloudy, to being themselves the source of times to which causal powers could be ascribed.”⁴² Like the Aeolian harp (another popular source of analogies in romantic literature), sundials enabled the patterns of the natural world to be perceptibly revealed. This passive responsiveness to nature was cherished and celebrated since (to use Hazlitt’s remark) it meant that a sundial “does not obtrude its observations.”⁴³ Given the intricacy of these preoccupations, it is insufficient to categorize all references to sandglasses and sundials in the literature of this period as being merely instances of reactionary nostalgia.
Although (as the foregoing discussion demonstrates) many critics have explored different aspects of the relationship between time and literature from a vast array of theoretical perspectives, they have often been curiously willing to accept a core set of beliefs about the practical time-telling conventions of the long eighteenth century. Ever since the 1960s, the dominant teleological metanarrative about the technological advancement of horology in Britain has delineated a clear progression from approximation and diversity to precision and uniformity—and such accounts center on the emergence of clock time. For instance, prompted in part by the alleged rejection of clock time, Christopher Miller has examined how the indistinct notion of “evening” became “an aesthetic occasion” during the second half of the eighteenth century.⁴⁴ In a similar manner, in his authoritative assessment of Wordsworth’s various timed-related preoccupations, Jeffrey Baker has claimed that clock time is the “lowest” form of temporal quantification, being “mechanical in the narrowest sense, inflexible and uncreative.”⁴⁵ Such views have become orthodox in critical studies, and they have their roots in the influential work of E. P. Thompson, who argued powerfully in 1967 that time discipline was a fundamental driving force behind the industrial revolution. In Alexis McCrossen’s recent description, “ “Time Discipline” is shorthand for how time—ideas about it, ways of measuring it, instruments for meting it out—controls actions, thoughts, dreams, desires”. ⁴⁶ Although hedged round with the wary caution of a professional historian, Thompson essentially maintained that clock time provided a uniform temporal framework that facilitated the synchronization of industrial activities—and this view has subsequently provided a foundation for many important studies such as Gerhard Dohrn-Van Rossum’s History of the Hour (1996) and David S. Landes’s authoritative A Revolution in Time (2000). These texts have deservedly become standard references for those intrigued by horological history, but more recent accounts have offered provocative revisionist perspectives that destabilize many of the old assumed verities. Glennie and Thrift, in particular, have robustly maintained that clock time remained a heterogeneous and relativistic notion well into the nineteenth century, demonstrating convincingly that many different clock times were elaborated by different communities of practice: “[ … ] there is no such thing as clock time. Rather clock time comprises a number of concepts, devices, and practices which have meant different things at different times and places, and even in any one place have not had a unitary meaning.”⁴⁷ They substantiate this controversial claim by examining probate inventories and diaries, and they reconstruct the way clocks and watches were actually used by ordinary people. Nonetheless, although they consider many different kinds of historical sources, they do not discuss literary texts specifically, despite acknowledging that crucial insights could be gleaned from such materials: “[w]e have taken little note here of work in literature, but [ … ] literature is both a source and a model for work on time.”⁴⁸ This observation suggests that a reconsideration of literature and time in the long eighteenth century is, as it were, timely.
Thus, literature can illuminate historical time-telling practices, but, as we have seen, a deeper historical understanding of such practices can in turn revitalize our appreciation of the time-based analogies, metaphors, descriptions, allusions, and narrative structures encountered in literature. The relationship between the two domains is conspicuously reciprocal. Richard Leigh described insects as “Living Watches”; an “hour-glass, winged” adorns Clarissa Harlowe’s coffin; Wordsworth wrote of the sundial’s “moral round”—and pertinent examples such as these certainly tell us things about both the culture of time-telling and the literature in which they are embedded.⁴⁹ Given these minutiae, it is perhaps inevitable that regrettable misunderstandings sometimes arise. Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Christabel” (written 1797–1800; published 1816) establishes a time and a place—“[t]is the middle of night by the castle clock”—before continuing:

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  Sir Leoline, the Baron rich,
  
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  Hath a toothless mastiff bitch;
  
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  From her kennel beneath the rock
  
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  She maketh answer to the clock,
  
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  Four for the quarters, and twelve for the hour;
  
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  Ever and aye, by shine and shower,
  
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  Sixteen short howls, not over loud;
  
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  Some say, she sees my lady’s shroud.
  

Critics have examined convincingly the poem’s metrical construction, its unfinished state, its homoerotic overtones, and its eerie medievalism; but the significance of the clock has occasionally caused befuddlement.⁵⁰ Too eager to discover temporal and semantic instabilities, Claire May doubted whether the “[s]ixteen short howls” of the mastiff can be “reconciled with the twelve called for by ‘the middle of night.’” Puzzled by this, she asked “is there some other temporality in question here, one to which the bitch may be attuned, but different from the time measured by the clock?”⁵¹ Alas, it is far more straightforward than that. The castle clearly has a striking clock, that is, one that chimes the quarters as well as the hours, and the howls and bells are in complete accord, at least numerically. A bell is struck once at 11:15 p.m., twice at 11:30 p.m., thrice at 11:45 p.m., and four times at midnight before the hour is sounded (i.e., 4 + 12 = 16 separate strokes). Therefore, the mastiff and the clock inhabit the very same “temporality.” The poem is certainly rife with temporal uncertainties, but these are manifest in rapid shifts from the present connotations of the perfect tense (“have awakened”) to the resolutely past preterite (“crew”), transitions that (as Susan Eilenberg has remarked) render the relationship between the present and the past in the poem “uninterpretable.”⁵² This cautionary example highlights the perils of such interpretative undertakings.